Business enterprises are increasingly expanding into global markets. Globalization of the marketplace has resulted in the allocation of limited resources across several governmental, cultural, and geographic borders. Moreover, businesses are expanding their offerings of goods and services. As part of this expansion, the majority of businesses have established multiple operating divisions and groups, each that may have different goals. Indeed, some goods or services are highly profitable, however, carry substantial risk, while others are prone to less risk, but are not likely to produce large profits. Furthermore, determining which projects to fund among multiple divisions or subsidiaries of corporations that have large quantities of personnel becomes difficult. Therefore, in many instances it would be beneficial to the enterprise to ensure that funded projects within the various departments do not deviate from the company's core goals, such that the enterprise suffers from profit erosion and/or an undue risk.
Current processes of prioritizing funding requests are disjointed and often result in an ineffective use of resources, both in terms of currency and human resources. Additionally, each line of business may not be adequately represented or may have limited opportunities to present multiple requests. This results in each potential project being viewed independently rather than utilizing a more comprehensive approach that considers the portfolio of investments in view of the enterprise's core goals. In this regard, prioritization has been based primarily on high level financial metrics, with little consideration for the longer-term strategic value that a project could add. Known systems also suffer from not measuring factors that are qualitative in nature and/or are not equipped to consider the specific goals of the enterprise. Rather many current solutions utilize generic measurements that often force the enterprise to form to the generic system's goals, rather than the enterprise's own goals.